Wednesday, July 29, 2009

Marwa was killed because of who she was (click here). She was brutally murdered because she was a Muslim. She was hated so much because she covered herself as Muslim women should be.

Ironicaly, head scarves were seen as symbol of women opression in the west. Yet she was brutally murdered by a member of a society who supposed to liberate people like her. The poor women was 3 months pregnant. She was stabbed 18 times by the very terrorist who harrased her months before. To compound the tragedy it was her husband that was shot by the court bailif because they thought the husband was the attacker and the bloody white male was actually trying to save her. Isn't that ethnic profiling already?. All men with beard must be Al Qeda or something. Should we call the man a christian extremist? white terorrist, yes?. No, our supposed liberators dont like that.

Marwa is a symbol of Europe's fear. They fear her because she did not want to be liberated. She want to be 'opressed' under the bloody hijab and head scarves. A nation that proud of their tolerance and freedom of expression suddenly finds no words of comfort to offer for this incident.

Monday, July 27, 2009

Saturday, July 25, 2009

This article was copied from Jewish Journal.com. It is interesting to note that Jewish thinkers are mindful of potential problems created by Increasing Muslim population in Europe and sought necessary solution to overcome this problem.

Yet, the Muslim thinkers are ignorant of what this positive development can do to impact the policy direction of European governments. That is the probloem when you are too fractured.

Why not the muslim nations with over population problem flood europe with muslims?

Protest in London Jan. 3 against Israel's operation in Gaza that was organized by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign, Stop the War Coalition, British Muslim Initiative and others. Photo: Claudia Vieira / Creative Commons

Vivian Teitelbaum was a new member of Brussels’ regional legislature when she sponsored a bill in 2005 to renew the region’s scientific and industrial research agreement with Israel.

Legislators had frozen the cooperation pact three years earlier to protest what they said was the Jewish state’s inhumane response to the Second Palestinian Intifada. However, when Teitelbaum’s proposal came up for discussion at a committee meeting, she said Socialist Party opponents shouted her down.

“The only lawmakers who showed up to the meeting were Muslim,” recalled Teitelbaum, a Jewish member of the Liberal Party. “They screamed insults at me, saying, ‘Israel is a fascist country. You will never get this passed.’”

Later, at the actual vote, Teitelbaum again was shouted down. Her proposal was defeated.

Ten minutes later, she said, “we voted for an agreement between Libya and the Brussels region, and everyone supported it. It was very painful for me.”

Although rarely discussed in Europe, the political impact and influence of the continent’s growing Muslim population is playing an increasingly significant role in European politics. In some cases, politicians are catering to Muslim interests and concerns, with an eye toward winning votes. In others, anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant political parties are capitalizing on a backlash against Muslims to expand their power base.

With Muslims now roughly 5 percent of Europe’s population and demographers predicting their proportion to double over the next 20 years due to birthrate disparities, their rising political awareness and ever-growing constituent base is likely to make them a factor in Europe’s political constellation for decades to come.

Eventually, that may translate into a tougher stance toward Israel, said Robin Shepherd, a senior research fellow at Chatham House, a London-based think tank.

“As Muslims become more electorally significant, the obvious casualty is Israel,” he said.

Many European politicians, particularly those from socialist parties, long have been strong critics of Israel’s dealings with the Palestinians without any prodding from European Muslims.

When the streets of Europe exploded in January during Israel’s 22-day operation against Hamas in Gaza, top European political figures were among those who participated in protests against the Israeli operation.

In Stockholm, the head of Sweden’s Socialist Party and the country’s former foreign minister joined 8,000 protesters Jan. 10 in a mostly Muslim demonstration full of anti-Israel slogans. In Spain, representatives of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero attended a rally in which some participants called for jihad, praised Hezbollah and cursed Israel. After the protest, which drew 100,000 people, the vast majority of them non-Muslims, the Israeli Embassy in Madrid took the rare step of openly chastising the prime minister for fueling anti-Israel anger.

Some analysts believe Europe’s Muslims will exert further pressure on political leaders when it comes to Mideast policy.

“Muslim-related issues will be a growing focus and shaper of the European political scene,” the U.S. National Intelligence Council noted in its forward-looking 2025 global trends report. “Ongoing societal and political tension over integration of Muslims is likely to make European policymakers increasingly sensitive to the potential domestic repercussions of any foreign policies for the Middle East, including aligning with the U.S. on policies seen as pro-Israeli.”

Yet despite their rapid growth rate, Muslims will not be able to dictate foreign or domestic policy in Europe anytime soon, the report said. For one thing, in some European countries up to 50 percent of Muslims do not have citizenship or national voting rights, according to some estimates.

Among Muslims in Europe generally, there is no hard data on what percentage are citizens with national voting rights, since European countries do not collect citizenship or immigration data by religion. Experts interviewed estimated that only about half of Europe’s Muslims are citizens; those who are not include recent immigrants, those whose home countries prohibit dual citizenship and immigrants unable to meet stringent citizenship requirements.

The proportions of Muslims who are citizens are higher in France and Britain, countries with long histories of Muslim immigration, and lower in Germany, where until 2000 the children of immigrants born in the country were not automatically granted citizenship.

The vast majority of Muslim immigrants to the continent hold legal residency permits, akin to green cards, which give them the right to vote in local elections but not national elections. In recent years, as concerns over the cultural integration of Europe’s Muslim population have risen, some countries have made their citizenship tests much harder. In the Netherlands, applicants must demonstrate a certain level of financial independence and approval of Dutch values, such as affirmation of gender equality and tolerance of homosexuality.

Another factor limiting Muslim influence on European foreign policy is that the primary concerns of Muslims in Europe, who tend to be poorer than average, are economic, not religious issues, according to a 2006 Pew Research Center survey.

Rather than forming political parties of their own, Muslim voters have helped strengthen socialist and other left-leaning parties that cater to disadvantaged populations.

Nowhere is Muslim political influence in Europe more evident than in Belgium, where fully one-third of the residents of the capital city of Brussels are Muslim. This is more than in any other major European city except for Marseilles, France, which has roughly the same proportion of Muslims. In some of Brussels’ local municipalities, Muslims account for 80 percent of the population.

Following the last election of the Brussels regional legislature in 2004, half the 26 legislators from the Socialist Party were of Muslim background, a record high for that legislature. Some Belgians attribute the strong showing by the socialists in that election to the party’s outreach to Muslim immigrants and the record number of candidates with Muslim names on the ticket.

Ermeline Gosselin, a spokeswoman for the Socialist Party in Belgium, insists that no one in her party looks at religion or ethnicity when selecting candidates.

“We are proud to represent Belgians of all backgrounds,” she said.

The mere discussion of Muslim political influence is taboo in some corners of Europe. Several European academics interviewed refused to consider the issue, arguing that it is misguided and possibly racist because it addresses the religious rather than economic or cultural concerns of Muslim immigrants.

Susanne Nies, head of the French Institute of International Relations in Brussels, said religion plays no role in Europe’s secular politics.

“If you want to talk about being critical of Israel, that is a feeling among many Europeans, so how can you characterize that as Muslim?” she said. “There is no such thing as a Muslim issue in Europe or growing Muslim influence on politicians.”

To be sure, many European politicians have their biases against Israel. On Jan. 23, Bert Anciaux, minister of culture, youth and sport in the Flemish government in Belgium, compared a deadly attack that day by a deranged gunman on a nursery school near Brussels to Israel’s recent operation in Gaza. The Belgian Foreign Ministry later distanced itself from the remark.

Shepherd said the 2008 mayoral campaign in London is a revealing example of Muslim influence in European politics.

In 2005, London Mayor Ken Livingstone accused Israel of ethnic cleansing and called then-Prime Minister Ariel Sharon a war criminal. His criticism of Israel helped win him the support of Azzam Tamimi, director of the London-based Institute of Islamic Political Thought and a public supporter of Hamas and Palestinian suicide bombers.

Tamimi mobilized British Muslims to support the mayor in his re-election bid last May, forming a group called Muslims 4 Ken that lambasted Livingstone’s opponent for supporting Israel. Ultimately, however, Livingstone failed to win a third term, losing to Boris Johnson.

European governments increasingly are afraid of offending Muslims, Shepherd said, leading them to refrain from criticizing Islamic attitudes toward women or even toward terrorism.

“This is a potentially volatile constituency, as we saw with the Danish cartoon controversy,” Shepherd said, referring to the widespread Muslim rioting in 2005 that followed publication in a Danish newspaper of cartoons featuring the prophet Muhammad. Government leaders made sure to criticize publication of the cartoons, even as they defended free speech, Shepherd noted.

Jana Hybaskova, head of the Israel committee in the European Parliament, said that despite the hostility of many European Muslim organizations toward the Jewish state, they rarely petition lawmakers on Israel-related issues. Presuming that Muslims share all the same political goals is a mistake, she added.

“To see Muslim as common denominator is like seeing Christians as all the same,” Hybaskova said. “I don’t see any common denominator on policy.”

One major obstacle to Muslim political power is the absence of any significant pan-European Muslim political organization. Muslims even have trouble organizing politically within their own countries in Europe. In France, the French Council of the Muslim Faith, a Muslim umbrella organization created in 2002 at the behest of then-Interior Minister Nicolas Sarkozy, has been virtually paralyzed by a rivalry between its Algerian and Moroccan factions.

The level of political activism among Muslims varies from country to country. In Britain, Muslims vote in higher proportions than non-Muslims, whereas in Belgium, the Muslim vote is below average.

Another major obstacle, according to Riva Kastoryano, director of research at Sciences Politique in Paris and an author of several books on Islam in Europe, is the relative poverty of Muslims. Muslims are not “in an economic position in Europe to make a big impact in politics,” she said.

Muslim organizations often are completely in the dark about how to lobby government officials for their most pressing needs, Kastoryano observed. In some cases, Muslim groups have even sought the help of Jewish groups.

“In Germany a few years back, when there was a wave of anti-Muslim violence, Muslim clerics turned to Jewish leaders to ask how to get government support,” she said.

In France and several other countries, Muslims have turned to Jewish organizations for help in acquiring government permission to continue to use halal meat — kosher for Muslims — when the method of Muslim slaughter risked violating local ordinances.

As for the few politicians in Europe of Muslim backgrounds, they tend to care more about loyalty to party, not Islamic ideology. On the national level, they’re also all secular.

“I am a socialist first, then Dutch, then someone with a Turkish-Kurdish background,” said Sadet Karabulut, a Dutch member of Parliament, whose parents are from eastern Turkey.

Asked whether her religion affects her political choices, Karabulut said, “My parents are Muslims, and it is my background, but I am not. It’s not important for me.”

Last October, Rotterdam became the first major city in Europe to elect a Muslim mayor, Ahmed Aboutaleb. Aboutaleb, who holds dual Dutch and Moroccan citizenship, has a reputation as a bridge builder between minority and majority groups. In 2004, after the murder of Dutch filmmaker Theo Van Gogh by an Islamic extremist, Aboutaleb told an audience at an Amsterdam mosque that Muslims who do not like Dutch values should leave the country.

That is little comfort to politicians like Teitelbaum, who points out that socialist politicians who used to condemn Turkey’s denial of the Armenian genocide now stay silent for fear of offending Belgium’s large Turkish community.

Teitelbaum sees it as further evidence of pandering to an increasingly influential political constituency.

When, in 2005, Teitelbaum sponsored a bill condemning a resurgence of anti-Semitism in Belgium, the bill could not pass until she generalized the bill, adding condemnation of “racism and xenophobia.” She was even urged by some colleagues to remove the word “anti-Semitism” from the bill.

Wednesday, July 8, 2009

Astonishing to me is the fact that no one seems to understand the ultimate result of the current policies and practices of Washington D.C. and the Federal Reserve Bank, the Fed. I have studied our economic situation for about 3 hours per day for the last 8 months and conclude we are bankrupt. Think about the facts.

Certainly most of the automobile industry, the airlines, 37 out of 50 states, are bankrupt. The lending industry, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac are bankrupt. Insurance giant AIG, bankrupt. The Pension Benefit Guarantee Corporation, or PBGC, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, Social Security including Medicare and Medicaid are rapidly approaching insolvency.In 1929 personal and corporate debt had risen to 365% of Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, before the Crash. We are now at 375% of GDP. So all of this excessive credit got us into this mess in the first place, right?. And the government and Fed solution to this mess is to print up an extra trillion dollars or so, give it to the lending industry and yell “Lend!, Lend!”. That should work, right?.

Remember TARP?, the money given to the banks and others to remove their “Toxic Assets” (sorry too harsh, let’s rename them “Troubled Assets.) Well, the toxins still remain. They exist in the form of Financial Derivatives, Credit Default Swaps, or CDS, and Collateralized Debt Obligations, or CDO. These financial instruments sound complicated, and they are. They are the inventions of Wall Street wunderkinds, the ones that get paid a couple of millions per year for their “brilliance“. The worldwide market (if you could call it that) or value of CDS is in the neighborhood of 600 trillion dollars, or 10 times the entire Worlds yearly economic output. How the banks and insurance giants are to clear their balance sheets of these toxins is no mystery . They cannot. Was it wise to take TARP money, 20 billion dollars, give it to General Motors when their market cap (the value of their common stock) was 985 million?. Will they pay us back?. No. They are bankrupt. The TARP was a fraud from the start, but it has bought the powers that be some time. Time, time for what?

There is a fever pitch rush to consolidate control over us by the government and the Fed. Look what they are doing to the banks, insurance, lending institutions, auto industry, airlines. Let’s now add health care. By the way, let’s appoint czars and give them power not granted by the Constitution. Why?, what’s the rush? To gain control before we go “out of control”?.

And now 37 out of 50 bankrupt states need to raise fees and taxes, and so does our federal government to pay for “free” healthcare. Raise taxes during a deep recession?, worked great in the early 1930’s, right?. Are these people idiots? Yes they are. Why not have a 2 trillion dollar deficit this year, and run up the national debt to 20 trillion dollars in a few years. Interest on the debt would only be 1 trillion a year at 5 per cent. Chump change. Government borrowing on such a massive scale will compete for the money in the open market and will make overall interest rates rise . Rates already rose a few weeks ago during a large treasury auction. Watch this carefully, mortgage rates will respond by going up. Think what this will do to the already very ill housing market.

Some “experts” as of late say they see “green shoots”, signs of economic recovery. What they “see” may be self-serving or it could be these people are delusional. The Fed Chief, Treasury Secretary, Congress and the President are lying to us. We are bankrupt and they know it. You can put a bandage on a gangrenous appendage and it looks fine, but if the appendage is not amputated the body will die. A bandage is all that is being applied to this gangrenous economy. Toxic.

So, where are we headed?. I suppose the Fed and the Treasury could just continue to print more money. Right up to the point it becomes worthless. The Weimar Republic of 1930’s Germany tried this. In the end the “money” was used to start a fire in a stove or was used as toilet paper. D.C. is too smart for this, right? Is there another way out of this mess?.During my research I floated the following question to 10 people of various economic means. “If you were told you had no more debt but got to keep what you had, but also you had nothing in your bank or 401K or stocks or IRA, just start anew” 9 out of 10 replied “That works for me”. Astounding, but very telling. How these people responded, along with my research, and what is unfolding (actually unraveling) leads me to the following.

We are going to wake up one morning and Matt Lauer will inform us of the following. “I’ve got good news and bad news for you, America. The good news, for most of you, is that there is no more debt. No government debt, personal debt or corporate debt. You get to keep what you have, your house, your cars, your flat screen TVs. You owe nothing. The bad news, for some of you, is that there are no assets. Your bank accounts are empty, all stock is worthless, and there is nothing in your 401K or IRA.”

None of our “leaders” in D.C. will want to take the blame for this, and will need an excuse for this. Most people will understand and even forgive how this happened when Matt goes on to say:“What I have told you is the direct result of a computer virus that has infected the worldwide financial complex that completely melted the balance sheets so that no one knows who owes what to whom anymore. This is why we have to start over. Just think of it as hitting the reset button. Details on the new government monetary system will come out shortly.” Problem solved, all absolved.

When the firestorm arrives, you will be glad you live in New Hampshire. At least here we may have a chance. During the dark days of the 1930’s peoples faith and morality held society together. Not so today sadly. Talk with your family, friends and neighbors. Come up with a plan.Things are about to become ugly. Very Ugly.MarketOracleUK

Saturday, July 4, 2009

“The sooner the extremists are isolated and unwelcome in Muslim communities, the sooner we will all be safer”. U.S. President Barack Obama, Cairo, June 04, 2009. According to U.S. leaders and their Zionist handlers, the term “extremist” is any nation or movement resisting U.S.-Israel domination and murderous ideology is defamed and deemed extremist. Whether in Afghanistan, in Iraq or in Pakistan, the extremists are part of the U.S. strategy to justify war of aggression.

Let’s be very clear. The Muslim world is not at war with the West, it is the West that is at war with Muslim nations. Neither Afghanistan nor Iraq attacked the U.S. and its allies. And despite the widespread of the virus of Islamophobia, particularly in Europe and America, Muslims are avoiding violence. Today, it is easier to invade Muslim nations, murder their women and children, and destroy them beyond belief.

George W. Bush and Tony Blair (the main culprits) were re-elected while their armies were committing horrendous war crimes in Afghanistan and Iraq. When will Westerners start protesting against the daily massacre of Muslim children by U.S.-NATO forces? In 2001, Afghanistan was invaded and occupied because the U.S. accused the former Afghani government (known in the West as the “Taliban”) of harbouring “al-Qaeda” extremists even when al-Qaeda never took responsibility for the 9/11 attack on the U.S. When the Afghani government offered to apprehend those extremists on behalf of the U.S. if the Bush regime provided the evidence against them, the U.S. refused the offer and embarked on a murderous and illegal war of aggression.

It should be acknowledge that, “al-Qaeda” was a U.S. proxy used against the Soviet troops in Afghanistan Indeed, in the 1990s the U.S. supported Osama bin Laden, while at the same time placed him on its so-called “most wanted list of terrorists”. Today, al-Qaeda is a card played when it serves Western imperialist interests. The entire country is decimated and thousands of innocent Afghan civilians, mostly women and children have been killed since the 2001 invasion. Recently, the United Nations reveals that in 2007 there were over 1,500 civilian deaths in Afghanistan. In 2008, the number has increase 40 per cent.

Although Western media often credit the U.S.-installed Ahmed Karzai “Afghan Army” of conducting military operations, the majority of civilians were killed by U.S./NATO indiscriminate bombings. The motive is the geostrategic importance of Afghanistan relative to the energy-producing region in Central Asia.

According to Ken Fireman of Bloomberg.com, Secretary of Defence Robert Gates told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on January 27, 2009: "U.S. goals in Afghanistan must be 'modest, realistic,' and 'above all, there must be an Afghan face on this war,' Gates said: ‘The Afghan people must believe this is their war and we are there to help them.

If they think we are there for our own purposes, then we will go the way of every other foreign army that has been in Afghanistan.'" Just replace Afghanistan with Iraq or Pakistan and you get a clearer picture of the real motives behind the U.S. pursuit of war and violence against Muslim nations. Furthermore, the war on Afghanistan is a test for a new NATO strategy as a global military intervention force and the future of NATO wars depend on this strategy being successful. Dominated by the U.S, NATO is an imperialist expeditionary force always on the look for a fight.

Perpetual violence is its most essential tool to impose its worldwide imperialist ideology. Hence, the U.S. war on Afghanistan has been labelled in the media as the “good war”. The war on Iraq is described as a “bad war” or a “strategic blunder”, not war crime. Iraq was invaded and occupied because the U.S. regime accused the Iraqi government of the late president Saddam Hussein of possessing ‘Weapons of Mass Destructions’ (WMD) and having links with extremists. Of course, the pretexts were a pack of lies.

The real motives behind U.S. violent aggression were: 1) to conquer Iraq’s oil resources; and 2) to enhance Israel’s Zionfascist expansion and dispossession of the Palestinian people. In order to expand the war further, Pakistan is accused of harbouring “extremists”. The CIA alleges – without a shred of evidence that Osama bin Laden, who according to reliable sources died in 2002, is “hiding” in Pakistan.

Western Zionist media, led by the anti-Muslims propaganda organs like the BBC, CNN and their variants, have obviously abandoned the truth and instead continue the warmongering agenda, inventing news and adopting the role of cheerleader. Pakistan is crucified and depicted as the “front of terrorism”. Of course, there is no hard evidence and the aim is to manipulate public opinion and prepare the world for another war.

The truth is that the Pakistani people are against U.S. murderous war on Afghanistan. Opportunists and apologists for U.S. war crimes are on the move again spreading pro-U.S. propaganda, without taking into consideration the consequences of their actions. In his latest fatigue in the Independent, Patrick Cockburn writes: “Pakistan is the root of the problem”. And “Pakistan was always the real base for al-Qaeda”. Of course, Cockburn has no evidence to support his usual recycled rubbish. To support his rubbish against Pakistan, Cockburn writes that the anti-Occupation Iraqi Resistance had many friends in Iran and Syria and so the Afghan Resistance has in Pakistan.

Only a deranged cynic can make such a statement. The murderous U.S. Occupation of Iraq made only possible with Iran’s with the U.S. Meanwhile, Ahmed Rashid, a native Pakistani informer who is well-known for his pro-Western propaganda, wrote recently: “Pakistan is about to collapse and only unconditional aid from the U.S. can stop this”. Rashid provided no evidence and his so-called analysis is just Western propaganda sponsored by the U.S. Zionist media. Rashid regurgitated Israel’s Zionist propaganda word by word. "[A] nuclear-armed military and an intelligence service that have sponsored Islamic extremism as an intrinsic part of their foreign policy for nearly four decades have found it extremely difficult to give up their self-destructive and double-dealing policies". His is consistent with the anti-Pakistan propaganda spread out by pro-Israel right-wing Americans. “Pakistan has 173 million people and 100 nuclear weapons, an army which is bigger than the American army, and the headquarters of al-Qaeda sitting in two-thirds of the country which the Government does not control”, said David Kilcullen, a right-wing former Australian army officer who made a career advising the Bush administration during the murderous surge in Iraq and now a consultant to the Obama Administration.

The myth of Pakistan nuclear defence will fall in the hands of few U.S. proxies is a distortion of reality planted by Israeli propagandists and U.S. Zionists. The Pakistani armed forces are not loosing Pakistan to few U.S. proxies. Like in Afghanistan and Iraq, the U.S. is sowing the seeds of violence in Pakistan by pitting one Pakistani community against the other. The arming and financing of militias like Tahrik-e- Taliban Pakistan (TTP) and Jundullah or “Soldier of God” by the U.S. is designed to destabilise Pakistan and the eventual break up of the nation in a Yugoslavia-like destruction.

The recent surge in attacks targeting mosques and religious congregations is a case in point. “It seems to me a calculated conspiracy to trigger sectarian violence in the country in line with Iraq so that the public attention could be diverted from real issues,” said Abdul Khalique Ali, a Karachi-based senior political analyst. It is important to remember that, the TTP has nothing to do with the anti-occupation Resistance movement in Afghanistan, known in the West as the “Taliban”. The TTP is a Pakistani religious fundamentalist militia based in the Swat Valley. It is armed by the U.S. and India through Afghanistan. The TTP despises the Resistance in Afghanistan. Jundullah is another anti-Iran/anti-Pakistan terrorist militia financed by the U.S. and Israel. It is used not only in Pakistan but it is also responsible for cross-border terrorist attacks in Iran which have killed a number of innocent Iranians citizens.

The problem in Pakistan is that the army has become a U.S. proxy army waging a war against its own people. It is used by the U.S. as a condom whenever the U.S. engaged in war. The Pakistan ruling clique is a Western-oriented band of corrupt landlords and businessmen serving U.S. imperialist interests at the expense of the majority of the Pakistani population. The Government’s reliance on U.S. funding allows the U.S. to hold the nation hostage to U.S. conditions, including the freezing of Pakistan’s nuclear and missiles program.

The people of Pakistan consider the Pakistani Government corrupt and subordinate to U.S. demands. Hence, the Pakistani people support any group fighting the U.S.-NATO occupation that is the greatest threat to the in the region. Under U.S. pressure the Pakistani army is attacking communities and towns in the north-western provinces and Waziristan. The province is home to the anti-occupation Pashtun tribes and fields more than thirty anti-occupation resistance groups.

There is no marked border and the people share one common goal; the liberation of their land from foreign invaders. Before the Pakistani army attacks, the province was under constant cross-border attacks by U.S.-NATO forces using CIA-operated drones, helicopter gunships and F-16s bombers in violation of Pakistani sovereignty. The attacks are now extended to include Baluchistan. Thousands of innocent Afghan and Pakistani civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed in indiscriminate bombardments. In addition, the attacks have caused a humanitarian crisis of two to three million internal refugees.

The situations looks more like the 1971 Britain-India sponsored partition of Pakistan and the creation of Bangladesh in Eastern Pakistan that precipitated mass migrations and massacres among Muslims. The refugees are left on its own, relaying on private charities and local NGOs to survive. The so-called “U.S. aid” to Pakistan to “rebuild” its shattered economy is an empty rhetoric. In fact the U.S. aid is fuelling the war and destroying the nation.

The U.S. is not in the business of “rebuilding”. History shows that every time the U.S. and its allies invaded and occupied a defenceless nation, they installed a colonial dictatorship and leave the country in ruins, drowning in poverty, suffering, diseases and deaths. Before he left to Saudi Arabia, President Obama told the New York Times (NYT 03 June 2009) that the pro-U.S. Arab leaders are not publicly expressing their concern about Iran developing nuclear weapons. “There are a lot of Arab countries more concerned about Iran developing a nuclear weapon than the [real] threat from Israel, but won’t admit it”, Obama told the Times.

It is a U.S.-orchestrated propaganda war against Iran designed to deflect attention away from the serious threat to world peace posed by Israel’s unchecked nuclear arsenal. We all know that Iran – with a legitimate right to nuclear technology, including uranium enrichment – doesn’t posses any nuclear arm or nearer to developing one. It is worth remembering that the same misleading falsehood propagated prior to the U.S. illegal invasion and murderous Occupation of Iraq. It was Dick Cheney, the U.S. most known (unindicted) war criminal, who went to see pro-U.S. Arab leaders. At the time, no one bought into U.S.-Israel propaganda. Most countries neighbouring Iraq have acknowledged that Iraq was not a threat.

Indeed, Iraq posed no threat to any nation. The U.S. and its few allies are guilty of illegal war of aggression, war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide in Iraq. For decades, Iran has been demonised in the West and subjected to ongoing anti-Muslims racist propaganda campaign (Iranophobia) on behalf of Israel’s Zionfascist regime. The U.S. and Britain continue meddling in Iran internal affairs, including fomenting unrest and inciting violence in order to sabotage Iran’s stability. At time of writing, Iran is being persecuted and condemned. Western media – packed by some Western governments – are questioning the legitimacy of Iran’s recent free and fair elections in order to discredit Iran’s legitimate government and destabilise the nation (See Esam Al-Amin, Counterpunch, 22 June 2009).

Democracy is not the reason behind Western meddling. Western ruling elites despise democracy. When did the British people have their chance to elect Gordon Brown? In 1953, the U.S. and Britain undermined and overthrew the democratically-elected Iranian government of Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh and replaced it with one of the most vicious dictators. (See Ghali Hassan, Global Research, 26 June 2005).

Now, imagine anyone questioning the legitimacy of the U.S.-staged fraudulent and violent elections in Iraq and Afghanistan? In his interview with the Times, Obama revealed that: “We have a joke around the White House. … We’re just going to keep on telling the truth until it stops working — and nowhere is truth-telling more important than the Middle East”. In American parlance, the term “truth” means fabricated lie. What the President really meant is telling the lie, not “the truth”, until people start believing it.

That is what George W. Bush said, after all. Meanwhile, Obama’s speech in Cairo (04 June 2009) – loaded with deceit, obfuscation, contradiction, hypocrisy, double-standards and empty of substance – was designed to manipulate public opinion, isolate the Islamic Republic of Iran and absolve Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. Instead of ranting from a country ruled by the U.S.-financed longest-serving tyrant in the Middle East, Obama should have travelled to Gaza (the largest Concentration Camp ever existed) to witness firsthand the countless Israeli war crimes, including mass graves of Palestinian children.

Sadly, Obama failed to acknowledge and condemned Israel’s violence and Israel’s role in Palestinians suffering and dispossession from their land. Obama remains silent on the recent massacre of Palestinian children and the U.S.-Israel sponsored murderous military siege of the Gaza. And who told Obama that Iraqis are better off under U.S. murderous Occupation than under a sovereign indigenous government? Since 2003, nearly 1.5 million innocent Iraqi civilians – mostly women and children – have been killed and more than 5 million Iraqis are refugees and displaced Iraqis. In addition to the destruction of Iraq’s health services and the education system, the U.S. brought into Iraq a culture of corruption and violence unheard of in Iraq’s history. Before 2003 U.S. invasion Iraq was an envy of the region.

Today’s Iraq is an example of a society that has been deliberately terrorised and reduced to state of abject destitution, its progressive Constitution was replaced by a U.S.-drafted sectarian and backwards constitution. So far, Obama has proved to be the creation of the U.S. wealthy ruling class. The President is “a global celebrity modelled easily into a brand” to all people, writes author Chris Hedges. But, what the new brand stands for remains a mystery to most ordinary people inside and outside the U.S. Obama seems comfortable following in the footsteps of his predecessors. It is unfortunate that many of the so-called “progressive” and “leftist” commentators and pundits are deliberately ignoring the power of the U.S. ruling class and instead focusing on Obama, the President.

The President is used to deflect public attention away from those who exert real power in the U.S. It is not difficult to see that Obama is surrounded by a band of anti-Muslims/anti-Arabs Judeo-Christian white ruling class. It is a collection of wealthy Zionists who exert total control on U.S. foreign policy, U.S. finance, the mainstream-corporate media and the U.S. education system. The U.S. Congress is their territory and devoted entirely to the defence of Israel and its Zionfascist policies in Palestine. Indeed, the Obama Administration is the most Zionist administration in America’s history. It is naïve to suggest that Obama has “inherited difficult challenges”. These are U.S. policies and Obama is in no position to change them. In fact, Obama is continuing and extending Bush’s policies. Just after he took office, Obama said that: “It will be a seamless transition”. In other words, “change” without change. As usual, the U.S. Senate has just approved $106 billion dollar war funding bill to fund the U.S. war on Afghanistan, Iraq and now Pakistan. With the U.S. war on Islamic nations has no end in sight, democratically elected nations are defamed and labelled “extremist”, while brutal dictatorship and religious fundamentalist regimes are welcomed with open arms and labelled “moderate”.

Both terms have nothing to do with the character of the groups. In his Cairo’s speech President Barack Obama told the Muslim world: “You are either with us or against us”. Picking and choosing America’s war on Muslim nations is not the right way to improve relations with the Muslim world. Peace is. G Hass www.daily.pk/world/americas/10566-americas-war-with-muslim-nations-.html

Wednesday, July 1, 2009

Iran’s Many Wars

June 25, 2009by Behzad Yaghmaian

Former Iranian President Ali Akbar Hasemi Rafsanjani (AP)

A specter is haunting Iran, the specter of a bloody civil war. Underneath the heroic movement for democracy by millions of Iranians, we are witnessing the final acts of a protracted war for the control of the Iranian economy, and the possibility of violent confrontations within the conservative block that ruled the country in the past thirty years.

June 12th was a coup d’état by Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) against Hashemi Rafsanjani and his family oligarchy. The Iranian economy has been the private turf of a handful of economic and political mafias since the revolution. Hashemi Rafsanjani and his extended family were among the first groups benefiting from Iran’s crony capitalism.

Using his political influence as President of Iran, and Speaker of the Parliament, Rafsanjani created a vast family dynasty. Initiating the liberalization of the economy after the war with Iraq, Rafsanjani ushered an ambitious privatization program, allowing members of his family, and other insiders, to take possession of state property at far bellow market prices. The family made a fortune when Rafsanjani opened the oil industry to private Iranian contractors. By the end of the 1990s, the economic power of the family was unparalleled in Iran’s private sector. In recent years, however, the family dynasty has been facing fierce competition, particularly from IRGC.

Since the 1990s, IRGC slowly transformed itself from a sheer military force, to a complex military, political, and economic oligarchy in control of main arteries of the Iranian economy. It is now a large holding company with multi-billion dollar, legal and illegal, contracts in oil, water, electricity, transport, foreign trade, and other economic sectors.

In 1999, Mehdi Karrubi, then the Speaker of the Parliament, made public IRGC’s smuggling activities through sixty illegal docs. In May 2004, hours after the grand opening of Imam Khomeini Airport in Tehran, armed members of IRGC stormed the compound, closing it down for alleged security reasons. It was later revealed that, using the airport, IRGC had been smuggling goods to the country.

The 2005 presidential victory of Mahmood Ahmadinejad, a former Revolutionary Guard, provided IRGC with a new advantage in its economic war with competitors. Rafsanjani ran unsuccessfully against Ahmadinejad, losing the race due to widespread vote rigging. The election was a turning point in the relationship between ITGC and Rafsanjani. The economic war intensified.

Ahmadinejad vowed to fight and eliminate the “oil mafia.” Appointing veteran guardsmen to cabinet positions, he gave IRGC the control of nine ministries, including Defense, Energy, and the lucrative Ministry of Petroleum, a stronghold of Rafsanjani family, the “oil mafia.”Access to the oil industry proved instrumental for IRGC. The economic war entered a new stage. IRGC aggressively penetrated areas once dominated by the Rafsanjani family.

Since the election of Ahmadinejad in 2005, the National Oil Company of Iran awarded IRGC a no-bid contract to develop the 15th and 16th phases of South Pars Gas, and another contract to build a 600-mile “peace pipeline” from Iran to Pakistan and India. IRGC also received a large contract to build a 900-kilometer pipeline from the Persian Gulf in the south to Sistan and Baluchestan in Iran’s southeast.

Aided by the increase in oil prices, Ahmadinajad pursued populist economic policies, gaining the support of a noticeable section of the electorate. High oil revenue, for a short period, reduced tension between different oligarchies. The decline in oil prices, however, ended the period of peaceful coexistence. A showdown was inevitable. It came during the recent Presidential Elections.

Mahmood Ahamadinejad’s attack on Rafsanjani and his family during his televised debate with Mir Hossein Mousavi was a calculated move, a political maneuver paving the ground for an all out war in later weeks and months. Rafsanjani requested permission to defend himself on Iran’s state-owned television network. His request was rejected. He formally complained to Ayatollah Khamenei. He was ignored, and silenced in the days that followed. Declaring victory in the elections, Ahmadinejad promised to prosecute and bring to justice those he assaulted during his campaign.

The days following June 12th were full of unanticipated developments. Millions of the Iranians poured into the streets, protesting on daily basis. Supporters of Ahmadinejad also waged two separate rallies in Qom, and in front of the Ministry of Justice in Tehran, with slogans against Rafsanjani. Addressing his supporters during Friday prayers at Tehran University on June 19th, Ayatollah Khamenei suggested dealing with Rafsanjani’s family’s economic misconducts through legal channels, while giving full support to Mahmood Ahmadinejad, and ordering a crackdown of all protests. The IRGC coup d’état seemed to have achieved its goal.

Ayatollah Khamenei’s orders to shoot, however, failed to stop people’s fury. The day after, millions poured to the streets of Tehran in an open defiance of the Supreme Leader. Many died, more injured. Violence, however, failed to stop the popular cry for democracy. Unanticipated by IRGC and the Supreme Leader, the continuing street protests opened a new front, influencing the future of the economic war, its winners, and its loses. The powerful democracy movement became the wild card in the battle for the control of Iran, and a possible savior of Rafsanjani in his final battle for survival.

Failing to negotiate a deal, Rafsanjani traveled to Qom, lobbying high-ranking clerics, and using his influence as the head of the Assembly of Experts to create The Council of Leaders to replace Ayatollah Khamenei. Empowered by the constitution to appoint and dismiss the Supreme Leader, the Assembly of Experts is Rafsanjani’s last legal resort in his long battle with IRG and Ayatollah Khamenei.

The removal of the Supreme Leader, if approved by the Assembly of Experts, may, however, prove costly and dangerous, risking a confrontation between various military factions within the ruling elite. Anticipating such an outcome, the Supreme Leader has ordered a reshuffling of top IRGC commanders, removing those suspected of loyalty to Rafsanjani.

Not a monolithic organization, in its leadership, and among the ordinary guards, IRGC may also face possible internal rifts, fracturing in the days and weeks to come. More than one-third of IRGC’s rank and file voted for Mohammad Khatami and his reformist platform in 1997. Dissertation and refusal to shoot at demonstrators remains a possibility. The continuation of the protests may also result in rifts within the Security forces, and the army.

The fight for political reform is intertwined with an entrenched factional struggle within the regime. Unlike 1979 when Iranians fought against a single, and undivided, political and military regime, Iran’s current political elite is divided. Different armed groups back various conservative factions. The rift within the Islamic Republic may be a blessing for the democracy movement, a breathing space for regrouping, and moving forward. It may also be a recipe for an uncontrolled factional violence. The democracy movement may become collateral damage in a larger war. The future remains unclear.

Behzad YaghmaianBehzad Yaghmaian is the author of "Social Change in Iran: An Eyewitness Account of Dissent, Defiance, and New Movements for Rights". He is a professor of political economy at Ramapo College of New Jersey. Yaghmaian can be reached at behzad.yaghmaian@gmail.com